MattyC wrote on Jul 30, 2012, 13:17:If they said the PC was the highest selling version they are still free to make console versions.

But they wouldn't really be free to program for the lowest common denominator (ie, the consoles) and to then just port straight to the PC. If the PC clearly outsold the console versions, they'd have to actually put some effort into their PC versions and make it an actual PC game. With such amazing things like an FOV slider *gasp*

To the best of my knowledge no Illuminati NWO lizard men would come and force them to only make PC games...

That's not really what I meant, what I meant was that they'd have to put far more effort into a PC game rather than the straight ports we get nowadays. They keep hiding behind the "Well, the console versions sell MILLIONS of copies more than the PC, so that's where we focus our efforts."

But I haven't seen skyrim be in the top 10 of the Xbox360 or PS3 in a LONG time, and yet apart from a few weeks, it's been there for the PC all along. (Which is now going on almost 8 months of being in the top 10.)

Far easier for them to hide behind the old "The consoles sell so much more!" and continue to program for the lowest common denominator, rather than (potentially, I have no idea if it's true, but it would seem to start to be) have to fess up the PC makes plenty of money, and suddenly you have to make a game for actual powerful hardware that you then can't easily scale down to work on the shitty console hardware.

Clearly effort was put into the PC version.

Yeah, not really. Most of the optimizations you've seen in the patches were discovered and implemented by the community through mods. It's laudable that Bethesda included them in a patch so that we could stop trying to run five different .exe modifiers at the same time, but on the flipside, why the hell was this stuff not included from the start? A simple 12 line script improved framerates by around THIRTY percent in some areas. That's not a sign of clear effort being spent on the PC version.

They chose release for several platforms because that makes the most money by making it available to everyone. It was not some 1/2 assed port.

Which I've never denied. But their focus is on consoles because according to them that makes the most money. And that's what I'm really starting to doubt. But it's far easier for them to program for consoles and port to PC than it is the other way around, even if that's really the way it SHOULD be if the PC sold more.